Wunderland(119)

“Bauer,” says Ava, articulating more clearly. “A German lady. I believe—I think that she used to live here.”

“Oh, I dunno,” the woman responds. “No, no. Not here.”

Ava bites her lip. “Have you heard of her before? Do you know where she might perhaps have moved?”

“No, no,” the woman repeats “Dunno. Not here.”

Ava sifts through her scrambled thoughts for something to keep the woman on the line. “Wait—then have you heard from a girl named Sophie today by any chance?” Something is cutting into the palm of her right hand. Looking down, she realizes that she still has the ’56 letter in her hand and is clenching it like an entrance ticket.

“No, no,” the woman says. “Zupah. You try Zupah. Okay. Bye-bye.”

“Zoo—what? Wait—please. Who should I try?”

But the speaker goes silent, and remains that way when Ava buzzes again, and then a third time. After the third ring she simply stands there, waiting; as though W. Park might return on her own or (even better) recall that she is not W. Park but R. Bauer after all.

This, of course, does not happen.

Carefully, Ava returns the letter to her purse and runs a trembling finger down the directory a second time. The closest thing to Bauer is G. Babayev. As she reaches the bottom this time, though, she spies a small-font listing that she hadn’t noticed before:

SUPERINTENDENT: APARTMENT 1A.

Zupah. She wants to hit herself. She settles for pressing 1A for just slightly longer than she’d pressed 5B.

A few seconds later a man’s voice answers: “Yeah?”

“Hello,” says Ava. “I’m hoping that you can help me. I’m—ah—I’m trying to find someone. Two people, actually. But only one whom I believe has lived in this building.”

“They all on the directory, miss.” The voice is deep, limned with the faintly melodic inflections of the Caribbean or the West Indies.

“No—I mean she used to live here. Many years ago. Her name was Renate Bauer.”

“Bowerrrrr,” the man repeats. It sounds for a moment as though he’s growling.

A pause follows. Ava feels herself holding her breath.

“Afraid it don’t ring a bell,” he says.

“Do you happen to know if a girl named Sophie tried to find her earlier today?”

“Not a clue.” His voice is harder now, impatient.

“Do you—do you think anyone in the building might remember? Someone who has perhaps been here for a long time?”

An incredulous laugh. “What the hell you think I am? A goddamn private investigator?”

The speaker goes dead.

Ava wanders back toward the street, her self-berating chant resuming. Stupid. Stupid. What did she think, she’d just waltz into a strange building and reunite with her mother’s long-lost best friend? In all likelihood, Renate Bauer isn’t even Renate Bauer anymore. She’s likely married and changed her name. Perhaps she is even dead.

Defeated, Ava begins slowly to make her way home—she will just have to wait for Sophie there. But when she passes the phone bank on the corner on Delancey and Essex she stops short again. Her first thought is to check messages, even though she’s only a few minutes from home. But after she’s tried two of the receivers (the first one is dead, the second coated in some sort of foul-smelling, greasy substance) and then called in to no voice mail, and then changed the answer message in case Sophie calls in (“Sophie, it’s Mom. I’m so sorry, sweetie. I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Please just call me”), an idea hits: an idea so improbable that it’s almost certainly delusional. Ava acts on it anyway: after waiting for the tone again, she punches in three digits: 4-1-1.

“City and state, please,” says the operator.

“New York, New York.” Ava licks her lips. “I’m looking for a Renate Bauer.”

“Can you spell the last name?”

“B-A-U-E-R. First name has an ‘e’ at the end.”

“One moment.”

As she waits for the results a new calm descends; as if her fate rests in this strange, polite woman’s hands. If she comes up with nothing, that is it. I will stop. I’ll apologize to Sophie and answer all her questions. We’ll put all of this nonsense behind us.

“I have two Renate Bauers,” the operator says.

Ava isn’t certain she’s heard the woman correctly. “Two?”

“Yes. One in Yonkers. The other’s on the Upper East Side. Do you want both?”

“Ah—yes. Yes. Both, please.”

Ava’s hands are shaking so much that she nearly drops the phone as she rummages in her bag for a pen, pushing past sunglasses, a capless ChapStick, two dirty-looking Wash’n Dri packets. For a heart-stopping moment she thinks she’ll have to memorize the numbers before digging up a broken stub of artist’s graphite. The only thing she has to write on are the envelopes: after hesitating, she pulls out the first one she finds and turns it over.

“Go ahead,” she says.



* * *





Ten minutes later she’s inside the graffiti-coated subway, which is packed for some reason (a concert? a game?) even though it’s a weekend. The crowd writhes and twitches like a single living organism: passengers inhabiting a rainbow of skin tones press into one another like lovers. The fan seems to be broken, leaving the heat as unrelieved as the stultifying damp of a terrarium.